Over the past few days I became aware of an uncharacteristic very slight shrillness in the high frequencies of my system. The effect wasn’t pronounced by any means - but was nevertheless enough to draw my attention to it. Moreover, something just seemed slightly ‘off’. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but music just didn’t seem quite so captivating and involving as usual. I could more easily tear myself away to do something else rather than feel compelled to continue listening, as is normally the case.
Now I try not to let things like this bother me. My experience has been that one can get into a sort of hypersensitive state where every little thing affects the sound. That way lies madness. So I tend just to ignore it when something doesn’t seem right and eventually it usually just goes away.
But not this time. It was beginning to grate. So I checked around. Had any cables been moved? I could see nothing untoward.
We use our system for TV sound and suddenly tonight whilst we were watching a program I happened to glance at the amp, a Moon 340ix, and it suddenly hit me. The front panel display, which I normally leave switched off, was on! I hadn’t noticed before - and I don’t know how it happened. So I switched it off and played some music from the Melco and hey presto! All was back to normal, with the usual sweet high frequencies and all the musical involvement back!
I have taken various measures to reduce noise in my system so I suspect it has a very low noise floor indeed. So presumably noise from the front panel display was emough to noticeably disrupt things.
I do recall when I had my CDS3 many years ago that switching off the display gave a worthwhile improvement.
No doubt the effect will vary from system to system. Some may not notice anything. Anyway I’ve nade a mental note - if things sound ‘off’ then remember to check that the display isn’t on!